For His Eyes Only

‘She didn’t appear to have read the script.’ No apology, no excuses... ‘She suggested that the advertisement was little more than a minor setback.’

‘Really? You’re quite sure the poor woman is not cracking up?’

‘As sure as I can be without a doctor’s note.’ But there was a distinct possibility that he was.

Milkmaids, roses...

Forget wheeling her in to apologise. If it was possible to be any more cynical, he’d have said they were hoping that she might use her charms, her lack of control over her buttons, to distract him from taking legal action.

He shouldn’t even be thinking about how far she might go to achieve that objective. Or how happy he would be to lie back and let her try.

* * *

‘Dad’s really worried about you, Tash. You’ve been working so hard and all this stress...well...you know...’ Her mother never actually said what she was thinking out loud. ‘He thinks you should come home for a while so that we can look after you.’

Tash sighed. She’d known that whatever she said, they’d half believe the newspaper story, convinced that they had been right all along. That she would be safer at home. No matter how much she told herself that they were wrong, it was hard to resist that kind of worry.

‘Mum, I’m fine.’

‘Tom thinks a break would do you good. We’ve booked the house down in Cornwall for the half-term holiday.’ So far, so what she’d expected. Her dad the worrier, her brother the doctor prescribing a week at the seaside and her mother trying to please everyone. ‘You know how you always loved it there and you haven’t seen the children for ages. You won’t believe how they’ve grown.’

Twenty-five and on holiday with her family. Building sandcastles for her nieces during the day and playing Scrabble or Monopoly in the evening. How appealing was that?

‘I saw them at Easter,’ she said. ‘Send me a postcard.’

‘Darling...’

‘It’s all smoke and mirrors, Mum. I’m fit as a flea.’

‘Are you sure? Are you taking the vitamins I sent you?’

‘I never miss,’ she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. She understood, really, but anyone would think she was still five years old and fighting for her life instead of a successful career woman. This was just a hiccup.

‘Are you eating properly?’

‘All the food groups.’

When the taxi had delivered her to her door, she’d gone straight to the freezer and dug out a tub of strawberry cheesecake ice cream. While she’d eaten it, she pulled up the file on her laptop so that if, in a worst case scenario, it came to an unfair dismissal tribunal she had a paper trail to demonstrate exactly what she’d done. Except that there it all was, word for word, on the screen. Exactly as printed. Which made no sense.

The proof copy she’d seen, approved and put in her out tray had been the one she’d actually written, not the one that was printed.

Either she really was going mad or someone had gone out of their way to do this to her. Not just changing the original copy, fiddling with the proof and intercepting the phone call from the Chronicle, but getting into her laptop to change what she’d written so that she had no proof that she’d ever written anything else.

Okay, a forensic search would pull up the original, but there would be no way to prove that she hadn’t changed it herself because whoever had done this had logged in using her password.

Which meant there was only one person in the frame.

The man who hadn’t let her know he was back a week early from a six-week rugby tour. The man who hadn’t come rushing round with pizza, Chianti and chocolate the minute he heard the news. Who hadn’t called, texted, emailed even, to ask how she was.

The man who was now occupying the upstairs office that should, by rights, be hers.

Her colleague with benefits: Toby Denton.

She wouldn’t have thought the six-foot-three blond rugby-playing hunk—who’d never made a secret of the fact that he saw work as a tedious interruption to his life and whose only ambition was to play the sport professionally—had the brains to engineer her downfall with such cunning.

His cluelessness, off the rugby field, had been a major part of his appeal. When there was any rescuing to be done—which was often when it came to work—she was the one tossing him the lifebelt. Like giving him her laptop password so that he could check the office diary for an early-morning appointment when, typically, he’d forgotten where he was supposed to be.

The announcement of his appointment as associate partner had appeared on the company website the day after she’d been walked to the door with her belongings in a cardboard box. Photographs of the champagne celebration had appeared on the blog a day later. It was great PR and she’d have applauded if it hadn’t been her career they were interring.

‘Tash?’ her mother asked anxiously. ‘Are you baking?’

‘Baking? No...’ Then, in sheer desperation, ‘Got to go. Call waiting. Have a lovely time in Cornwall.’

Call waiting... She wished, she thought, glancing along the work surface at the ginger, lemon drizzle and passion cakes lined up alongside a Sacher Torte, waiting for the ganache she was making.

She had been baking. She’d used every bowl she possessed, every cake tin. They were piled up in the sink and on the draining board, along with a heap of eggshells and empty sugar, flour and butter wrappers and a fine haze of icing sugar hung in the air, coating every surface, including her.

It was her displacement activity. Some people played endless computer games, or went for a run, or ironed when they needed to let their brain freewheel. She beat butter and sugar and eggs into creamy peaks.

Unfortunately, her mind was ignoring the no-job, no-career problem. Instead it kept running Darius Hadley on a loop. That moment when he’d turned and looked at her in Miles Morgan’s office, his face all dark shadows, his eyes burning into her. His hands. The glint of gold beneath dark curls. The air stirring as he’d walked past her, leaving the scent of something earthy behind.

That moment when he’d stopped in the street and looked back and she’d known that if he’d lifted a hand to her she would have gone to him. Worse, had wanted him to lift a hand...

Her skin glowed just thinking about that look. Not just her skin.

Madness.

Her skin was sticky, her eyes gritty; she had no job and no one was going to call. Not Miles. Not any of the agencies that had tried to tempt her away from him. Last week she was the negotiator everyone wanted on their team, but now she was damaged goods.

If she was going to rescue her career, this was going to have to be a show rather than tell scenario. She would have to demonstrate to the world that she was still the best there was. Her brain hadn’t been dodging the problem; it had been showing her the answer.

Darius Hadley.

She was going to have to find a buyer for Hadley Chase.

A week ago that had been a challenge, but she’d had the contacts, people who would pick up the phone when she called, listen to her when she told them she had exactly the house they were looking for because she didn’t lie, didn’t waste their time. Matching houses with the right buyers was a passion with her. People trusted her. Or they had.

Now the word on the street was that she’d lost it. She was on her own with nothing to offer except her wits, her knowledge of the market and the kind of motivation that would move mountains if she could persuade Darius Hadley to give her a chance.

She was going to have to face him: this man who’d turned her into a blushing, jelly-boned cliché with no more than a look.

In the normal course of events it wouldn’t have been more than a momentary wobble. It had been made clear to her by the estate’s executor that the vendor wanted nothing to do with the actual sale of his house and if he’d let her just get on with it she would never have seen him again. Apparently her luck had hit the deck on all fronts that morning.

At the time she hadn’t given the reason why Darius Hadley was keeping his distance any thought—it had taken all her concentration not to melt into a puddle at his feet—but the more she’d thought about him, the more she understood how it must hurt to be the Hadley to let the house go. To lose four centuries of his family history.

If there was no cash to go with the property, he would have no choice—death meant taxes—but it was easy to see why he’d been furious with them, with her, for messing up and forcing him to confront the situation head-on. Maybe, though, now he’d had time to calm down, he’d be glad of someone offering to help.

Selling a country estate was an expensive business. Printing, advertising, travel, and she doubted that, in these cash-strapped days, he’d be inundated with estate agents eager to invest in a house that had been publicly declared a money pit.

Hopefully she’d be all he’d got. And he, collywobbles notwithstanding, was almost certainly her only hope.

Fortunately she had all the details of Hadley Chase on her laptop.

What she didn’t have were the contact details for Darius Hadley.

She’d had no success when she’d searched Hadley Chase on Google hoping for some family gossip to get the property page editors salivating. She assumed it would have thrown up anything newsworthy about Darius Hadley, but she typed his name into the search engine anyway.

A whole load of links came up, including images, and she clicked on the only one of him. It had been taken, ironically, from one of those high society functions featured in the Country Chronicle and the caption read: ‘Award-winning sculptor Darius Hadley at the Serpentine Gallery...’

He was a sculptor? Well, that would explain the steel toecaps, the grey smears on his jeans. That earthy scent had been clay...

His tie was loose, his collar open and he’d been caught unawares, laughing at something or someone out of the picture and she was right. A smile was all it took to lift the shadows. He still had the look of the devil, but one who was having a good day, and she reached out and touched the screen, her fingertips against his mouth.

‘Oh...’ she breathed. ‘Collywollydoodah...’

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